In an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), a node may be associated with the metering of a consumable resource, such as electricity, natural gas or water. Such nodes may be organized as an autonomous routing area (ARA), having a tree structure that may be headed by a root node and/or router node. Network traffic may include both upstream and downstream flows of packets. Upstream flows may involve each node forwarding packets to an upstream node (e.g., one-hop parent). Downstream flows may involve each node forwarding packets to a downstream node (e.g., one-hop children of the node), which may be done according to explicit route information.
Both upstream and downstream flows of packets may consume limited bandwidth available in the ARA. Accordingly, the transmission of one or more flows, or packets within the flow(s), may slow the transmission of other packets and/or flows of packets. Thus, many packets, and entire flows of packets, may fail to meet quality of service (QoS) requirements and/or service level agreements (SLAs).